Fotodiox Lens Mount Adapters

Use SLR lenses on digital cameras

If you’re getting started in digital photography, or have just picked up your first DSLR/mirrorless camera, your first purchase should be OLD lenses.

Vintage manual lenses take as good (often better) images than newer lenses, particularly on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Search eBay, Goodwill, Craigslist, and thrift stores for old SLR gear. My favorite lens is a Asahi Super Takumar 50mm f/1.4 — it sells for around $100 on eBay, and probably much less in a local shop. The quality of the lens blows away the cheap “nifty fifties” you can buy new. That’s just one example of dozens if not hundreds. It’s an affordable way to learn about focal lengths and image quality.

But much more importantly, shooting with vintage manual lenses forces you to THINK about your photography. Having to focus each shot and choose an aperture has made me a much better photographer. You can’t fire and forget and hope the camera made a good choice for you. That’s the real value of shooting with manual lenses.

That brings us to the cool tools in question — how to mount old lenses on new cameras. On my Sony A57, my Takumar lenses are mounted using a $6 adapter from Fotodiox. It’s as simple as it gets — screw the adapter onto the lens, mount the lens on the camera. I also use a Fotodiox adapter on a manual Nikon 70-200 f/4 zoom.

Fotodiox makes adapters for just about every camera system in existence. They range from less than $10 to hundreds of dollars. Some adapters come with focusing glass, which you may need to focus to infinity depending on the lens-to-sensor distance on some cameras.

I’ve dealt with Fotodiox for nearly two years, and they’ve been a great company with great service — when one adapter shipped with a missing screw, they quickly shipped a replacement, no questions asked.

A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. All reviews on this site are written by readers who have actually used the tool and others like it. Items can be either old or new as long as they are wonderful. We post things we like and ignore the rest. Suggestions for tools much better than what is recommended here are always wanted.